Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, Updated by Steve Solomon
Author:Steve Solomon [Solomon, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57061-898-7
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2013-12-16T22:00:00+00:00
Growing Your Own
Although raising seeds of high uniformity is a specialist’s art, quite acceptable garden seed for most species can be grown in the maritime Northwest. I do a lot of it in my own garden and find it’s fun—and I’m really proud to use my own. I hope all my readers will, at least once, transplant a few surviving overwintered kale, endive, lettuce, or beet plants to the dry fringe of their garden and let them have at it. Six big kale plants will make a lot of seed!
In Chapter 9, I run down seed making, vegetable by vegetable. Here are some general hints that apply to almost all at-home production.
In the vegetable-seed industry, seed is divided into two general sorts: dry and wet. Wet seed forms and matures inside a moist fruit. After separation from the pulp, the seed has to be dried. This describes tomato, pepper, eggplant, squash, cucumber, melon, and so on. The other sort, dry seed, dries in the field on stalks or in other sorts of little pods or containers.
The biggest problem facing the gardener who wants to produce vigorous dry seed is how to avoid moistening the forming or drying seed when irrigating the rest of the garden. Accomplishing that is mostly a matter of careful layout to establish a seed-growing area. Many species that make dry seed are biennials; those that survive the winter can be dug early in spring and transplanted. When saving dry seed from annuals like beans or peas in a generally irrigated garden, you may have to take special pains to pick the seed pods one at a time a few days before they’ve completely dried out. This isn’t much trouble; a few dozen pods will provide plenty of seed for next year.
Only fully mature seed will be vigorous, so the home seed grower should take great care to allow dry seed to dry out fully (or at least form to the point that the plant is no longer putting nutrients inside the seed coat) before harvest. Remember that seed needs to be harvested as soon as it dries out or, with species that tend to lose a lot of seed to birds or shattering seed pods, just before it completely dries out. Repeated dampening by the heavy dews of late summer greatly lowers vigor and germination percentage, and rain is worse. (If the late-season weather doesn’t cooperate, dry the nearly mature seed under cover before threshing; it won’t be quite as vigorous, but it still may sprout okay for some years. It all depends on how close to ripe the seed was when cut.) When raising wet seed, let the fruit get completely ripe, even beginning to rot a bit, before you pick it off the plant and extract the seed.
Raising your own seed means being an amateur plant breeder. There is no avoiding this. You must decide which plants to propagate. Even if you choose to make seed from all the plants you started, you are making a choice not to choose.
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